In recent years, a large quantity of data have been handled by computers with the advent of an advanced information society, and numerous computers have often been installed and managed collectively in one room in a facility such as a data center. In a data center, for example, numerous racks (server racks) are installed in a computer room and a plurality of computers (servers) are housed in each rack. Then, a large amount of jobs are efficiently processed by being organically distributed to the computers depending on operation statues of the computers.
A large amount of heat is generated from the computers along with the operation of the computers. A rise in temperature in each computer leads to an error or malfunction. Accordingly, it is important to cool the computers. In the data center, a large amount of electric power is used for cooling electronic equipment such as the computers.
On the other hand, there is a demand for reductions in power consumption by data centers from the viewpoint of energy saving. In this regard, there have been proposed techniques to recover heat (waste heat) emitted from electronic equipment such as computers and to recycle the heat as energy.
In general, the temperature of heat recovered from electronic equipment such as computers is equal to or below 90° C. Here, cool water usable for air conditioning or cooling the electronic equipment, for example, may be obtained by using an adsorption heat pump (AHP) which utilizes the waste heat at 90° C. or below.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2002-100891
Patent Document 2: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2009-121740
Patent Document 3: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 10-300271